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“Indignation,” the directing debut of the longtime
independent film producer and executive James Schamus, is a movie so
insistently out of step with contemporary American cinema as to be considered
practically defiant. Adapted from a novel by Philip Roth (his 2008 book of the
same name and his penultimate novel if we are to believe that he is now finally
done with writing) “Indignation” is, like much of Roth’s late work, concerned
with, or perhaps the better phrase is “consumed by” mortality and its
inevitability.

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Marcus Messner is a young man of great promise in Roth’s
Newark, New Jersey—the author’s own Yoknapatawpha County, it turned out—first
seen, or at least presumably first seen, attending the funeral of one of his
high-school buddies, who’s been killed in the early years of the Korean War.
The movie actually opens with a scene of single-soldier battle overseas, with
framings that recall the work of Samuel Fuller. In any event, that conflict is
one thing that Marcus needn’t worry about. The son of a butcher, Marcus has a
scholarship to the Ohio college of Winesburg, and a draft deferment to match.
Marcus is a devoted son and an exceptional student. He behaves well and holds
himself to what he considers a high ethical standard. His only real issue,
beyond his increasingly overprotective-to-the-point-of-frantic father, is his
attachment to his intellectual independence, a pronounced disinclination to “go
along to get along.” That and his rather understandable sexual naiveté. We are
talking about 1951.

At Winesburg (the allusion to Sherwood Anderson is
deliberate, as is the depiction of the place as an ideal place from which to
leave), Marcus balks at joining a Jewish fraternity and fervently pursues his
studies, but becomes enamored of a coed named Olivia (Sarah Gadon), a beguiling and brilliant
young woman who chastises Marcus: “You are not a simple soul and you have no
business being here.” She does not know how tragically right she turns out to
be. And not just about Marcus. An episode of amorous generosity on Olivia’s
part throws Marcus into a tizzy, and his inability to process it sets in motion a
series of events that … well, as Marcus himself informs the viewer in voice-over
narration early on, his own death will be the finish of them.

The title “Indignation” refers not only to Marcus’ state as
he’s forced to justify himself to everyone around him, including a pious
sophist dean of students (Tracy Letts), but also to the work’s own attitude. The novel’s
measured prose carries a subtext of absolute rage at the arbitrary unfairness
of fate. Schamus, who also wrote the screenplay to this film, is very
concerned, or one might say consumed by, the idea of carrying this over to the
screen. So he has constructed his film of Roth’s book in a style that is
measured to the point of near solemnity. The movie moves very slowly. Much of
its action—and the action largely consists of two, sometimes more, people engaging
in impassioned and ever deepening conversation—is captured in long takes,
carefully composed medium shots in which the actors are free to breathe and
move but which still constrain them somewhat. A film scholar before he became a
filmmaker, Schamus has written beautifully about the work of the Danish
director Carl Theodor Dreyer, and his method here harks back to the stark
plainness of a work like “Ordet” and sometimes even recalls the overt
theatricality of the director’s last film “Gertrud.” Drawing superb
performances from each and every one of his actors, Schamus meticulously makes
every shot, and every gesture contained within that shot, count. Slowly, he
accrues irony after irony in the details. The two Jewish upperclassmen Marcus
first rooms with seem interesting enough fellows at first, with ideas of their
own; eventually they are revealed as conventional hypocrites, and as one of
them shows his true colors, the frame reveals, for the first time, a dinky
little reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”
the fellow has taped to the wall by his bunk.

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Schamus’ commitment to a style, and to the material, yields
potent results. The cast cannot be commended enough: Logan Lerman keeps a
distinct and uncallow likeability even when Marcus is deliberately being
insufferable. As Olivia, Sarah Gadon is spectacular, depicting a young woman who
knows her own mind but can’t control it from taking her to terribly dark
places. The playwright and actor Tracy Letts displays masterful control as the
dean, a fellow who really is insufferable, through and through, but is also a
man of his time, and for his time and for all that was awful of his time. As
the movie draws to its inexorable conclusion, Schamus reveals one overt
narrative trick he had up his sleeve the whole time, and if you’ve keyed in to
the movie’s rhythms, it’s quite a devastating one. It brings home all the
indignation of Roth’s work, and adds some fresh fuel to that fire.

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